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Speech to IPPR’s Seminar on The Youth of Today

Wednesday 19th January 2005, 10:00am – 12:00noon.

My job means I spend a lot of time talking to young people.

They talk to me about their hopes and fears; their likes and their dislikes; their priorities, their needs and their aspirations.

And one frequent cry which consistently echoes in what they say to me is their frustration and anger at how the actions and behaviour of a few young people are perceived by society as reflecting the actions and behaviour of most young people.

Most young people are not anti-social yobs, criminals, binge-drinkers or drug addicts but images portraying them as such can feed into a climate of distrust and negativity which is both unfair and untrue.

It is absolutely right for people to express their anger and for Government to act to tackle the minority of young people who make other people’s lives a misery.

But we do our young people an injustice when we focus disproportionately only on the small number of problem kids and fail to recognize the talents, inventiveness, energy and drive of our young people and the huge contribution they make to society today and will make in the future.

Young people today are not all jobless layabouts: there are half as many 18-24 year olds signing on today as there were in the mid 1980s.

Young people today are not all yobs: in 2001 98.2% of 10-17 year olds were neither cautioned, nor convicted of any criminal offence.

Most young people today are working harder at school and getting better qualifications: 54% now achieve 5 or more GCSEs at grades A-C. In 1962 only 16% of school leavers achieved that level of qualifications.

Young people do care about the world we live in: six out of ten have helped to raise money for good causes and more than six out of ten give unpaid help through clubs and organizations to help other people.

So one of the purposes of our forthcoming Youth Green Paper is to celebrate the contribution young people make to their communities and our society – and to see how we can build on the good.

Since this Government came to power we have listened and responded to the needs of young people, particularly those of vulnerable young people. We have created Drug Action Teams in every local authority. We have funded teenage pregnancy strategies in every local authority. We’ve financed the Choice Protects programme for looked after children. We have created the Youth Justice Board, we have initiated the Transforming Youth Work agenda and we have established the Connexions service –

and much more. And we have created an educational environment that allows more and more young people to fulfill their potential. These are firm – excellent – foundations upon which to build, and we want to go further for our young people.

We want to respond to the very real needs of young people and their parents that they talk to me about. And we want to act on all the evidence we have on what helps young people to realize their full potential.

Teenagers today do have greater opportunities but they also face more risks. They are materially better off, they have better education opportunities and they are able to take advantage of new technologies.

At the same time, issues like bullying in the classroom or on the streets can create huge misery for some young people, and young people are more likely to be victims of crime. 15% of 15 year olds are obese and drug taking and alcohol misuse undermines the life chances of too many young people. The figures on young people who opt out of training, education or work remain stubbornly high, and none of us would accept the outcomes for the most vulnerable group of young people who come out of the looked after system if we were their parents. And, shockingly, the incidence of mental health illness is now almost one in eight, with suicides, particularly by young men, accounting for one in five deaths among young people.

Now, then, is the time to reflect, to think smarter, and to see what more we can do to support more positive outcomes for all young people. Young people are – first and foremost – people, not policies or programmes or projects. We need to approach them as such by looking at their needs in the round, holistically. At present we all too often respond to specific risks with specific initiatives.

For example, we know that young girls are more likely to become teen mums if they lack self esteem and are not achieving in school and we know that girls who truant regularly from school are more likely to become pregnant. So we need to respond to all the challenges the young girl faces rather than simply focus on the sex and relationships education, important though that may be. Similarly three out of four teenage boys who appear before the youth court are not in education, training or employment. And those with a mental health disorder are four times more likely than others to truant from school.

And I know from talking to many troubled and troublesome teenagers that they are supported by a range of professionals in their daily lives – and this is not be the most effective way of helping the young person. The mother of a young disabled girl whom I visited in her home recently told me that she had experienced 18 separate assessments in the previous 6 months by a range of professionals. The mother spent more time managing professionals than supporting her daughter although she was the girl’s main carer. What most young people want and need is one trusted adult who is able to advise and guide them through their difficulties. It is the most vulnerable that need stability the most and they are the ones who get it the least. What could be more effective would be precisely what lies at the heart of our Change for Children reform programme; we need to break down the separate professional silos and build services around the needs of children and young people, with the voice of children at the heart of all we do.

The overwhelming cry from both parents and young people is around the lack of activities and facilities for their teenagers. Talk to any mum or dad and the thing they say would most improve family life is the provision of places to go and things to do. Talk to any teenager and they voice the same plea – they want more and better places where they can spend their leisure time with their friends.

Let me try to unpick this cry from young people and their families.

First, of course, places to go and things to do matter. We tend to think that as long as we get the formal schooling right everything else will fall into place. But the average teenager spends 60% of their waking hours not in school, so if we want young people to flourish and if we want to divert young people from anti-social behaviour, thinking about what the community can provide really counts. Some adults perceive teenagers on the streets as a problem and teenagers want safe spaces to hang out! Surely we must somehow be able to square that circle.

But at present, all too often what teenagers get is what adults decide is right for them and that, I think, is where things can start to go wrong. It’s often not that facilities don’t exist, but that the teenagers don’t like what is on offer.

A recent Youth survey in Southwark found that 53% of young people simply didn’t like the youth facilities that were there, whilst only 10% said there was nothing on offer. Of course this can sometimes be about perceptions of what is on offer rather than reality – but the perception is, in itself a problem, because it stops young people getting involved.

Whilst that finding might come as no surprise, it is frequently ignored when people are considering what to provide for young people. The teenage years are a time when young people are starting to separate from their parents, when they are establishing their own identity and developing their independence. Their relationships with their friends become more important and the influence of their parents often fades for a while. Yet we still tend to decide things without even consulting them and then get angry and judgmental when we get it wrong.

We’ve increased the money we allocate to local authorities for their youth services and there are some brilliant examples of excellent practice. But overall the impact is variable. Different youth services approach the work of engaging young people very differently. In some localities the youth service only reaches 10% of young people in their area, whilst in others 60% of young people access the services. We want youth services to reach more young people. We have recently asked Youth Services to try to ensure that they reach at least 25% of young people locally – and that is a real challenge for some services. The evidence on the quality of youth services from Ofsted inspections shows that whilst most provide a good service a substantial minority need to improve their offer.

And think about where we all live. I see notices saying ‘No Ball Games’ or ‘No skateboarding.’ Often that is quite right because of the need to keep places and people safe. But perhaps we should think more about where young people ‘can’ not just where young people ‘can’t’ spend their time on activities in which they want to engage.

One message from all of this is that we need to ensure that young people feel a real ownership of what is provided for them locally. Again a constant theme in our Change for Children programme – children and young people’s voices must be at the heart of everything we do.

But the issue is more complex because of the growing body of evidence we are accumulating on who does what and the impact certain activities can have on young people over time.

All the surveys of how young people spend their time show that they enjoy going to the cinema, watching or playing sport, going to concerts and gigs and going to a dance, play, musical, art gallery or museum. We also know that a growing number of young people spend their spare time volunteering and giving back to the community.

But all the studies also show that there are about 25-30% of young people who do none of these things. And these tend to be the older teenagers; they tend to come from poorer families and they tend to be the ones who end up being seen as a problem to their local communities. So one of the challenges we face is how we can engage this group in activities they enjoy.

But there is another challenge which we are thinking about. The Institute of Education has completed some work for us examining in detail the impact of a variety of youth activities over time on the group of people who were born in 1970 and who are now in their thirties.

Of course, we have to treat the research with caution. The 1980s when this group was teenagers, were different from this first decade of the new millennium. And it’s always difficult to establish precise causal relationships in people’s patterns of behaviour.

But the research gives us challenging findings that we need to think about. What the research shows is that having stimulating activities for young people matters, having a focus for those activities is important and having good adult supervision is important.

We know that young people need more than just a “place to go”. Just “hanging out” not only does nothing for young people but the research tells us it can have negative outcomes. The researchers have controlled for all the obvious variables of background, education attainment and family composition. And once they have done that, they found that if young people spent time in places without some kind of focus and organisation – that could be as little as organizing a football match – without it they were more likely to have poor educational outcomes, more likely to offend and more likely to end up as adult smokers.

Of course the research does not control for the personal preferences of these young people and it may be that those young people were more likely to have problems later anyway. But looked at baldly, this research tells us that these young people would have been better off at home watching television than spending their time with others in this way.

Without focus and organization this sort of provision positively helped young people down the wrong road.

What we can’t ignore is that the type of activities young people engage in when they are teenagers can have a long term negative or positive influence on them in adult life. The things they do and places they go to really matter. We must take cognizance of this research as we plan for the future. But it leaves us with a tricky circle which we need to square. On the one hand we know that youth facilities will only be effective if they provide what young people want; on the other, we know that simply creating spaces where teenagers can hang out without a focus won’t just fail to enhance life chances but could damage them.

Squaring that circle can only be done through greater involvement of young people in designing and influencing services that are for them. We are already doing good work on this front. For example we are involving young people in Ofsted Inspection teams, and in the interviews for posts like Connexions PAs and the Children’s Commissioner. But much more needs to be done - and this is one of the challenges we will attempt to tackle in our Green Paper.

Of course the importance and influence of parents overrides all other influences in young people’s lives. Nine out of ten young people tell us that they have had a happy childhood and most teenagers turn to their parents first. So if they are fed up and depressed they will talk to their parents to start with. They look to their parents to tell them about sex and relationships and they only want school to fill in the gaps.

But as all of us who have had children through their teenage years know, these are the most difficult years for us as parents. Indeed the advice I most often got from friends and which I now most often give to friends is ‘Just hang on in there and keep faith! It all gets better!’

However parents do want more support and advice about parenting teenagers. This is about responding to parents’ expressed demands and providing the support which will empower people to be better parents. So as we consider how we configure all the advice and guidance services for young people we need to ensure we provide the help parents seek. Indeed it has always amazed me that we are generous with support and advice in the very first days of a child’s life, but we ignore the demands of parents when we get to those teenage years when it’s so difficult to get things right and when the relationship between parents and their children is changing.
The whole area of advice and guidance is a key part of our agenda for young people. As we develop the individualized curriculum offer which the Tomlinson report proposes we have to ensure that young people get good advice, at the right time, which they can trust and which helps them make the right choices for themselves.

Getting good career advice has always been a challenge, but ensuring appropriate and competent support for young people as they make their curriculum choices will be critical to our endeavour to raise the skills and qualifications of our young people so that they pursue courses which are best suited to their individual needs, talents and aspirations. And if the advice is to really help we need to recognize the importance of parents and teachers in helping young people decide about their future.

When I first got this job there were many who expressed concern that our focus was on children and the well-being of our young people was being sidelined. That is not true. Our offer for young people is a central part of our programme of reform. Indeed we have an important and rare opportunity to really make a difference in what for too long has been a neglected area of policy. Making sure that young people get the best advice as they make their career choices and move from dependence to independence; giving support that works to those young people who face additional needs and challenges; and providing popular and positive things to do and places to go for young people will make a huge difference to the young people themselves, to their families and to their communities. They are our future and it is in their interests and ours to get this right.